After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the
regions so well known to his imagination, found them strangely
barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magic
monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the
criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic
severity of the daily task that gives bread—but whose only reward
is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet he
could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing,
disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his
prospects were good. He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a
thorough knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young,
he became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been
tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the
inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his
stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret
truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.
Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the
earnestness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often
made apparent as people might think. There are many shades in the
danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that
there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of
intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind
and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or
these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice,
with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that
means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his
fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy,
to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all
that is priceless and necessary—the sunshine, the memories, the
future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away
from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his
life.
Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a week of
which his Scottish captain used to say afterwards, 'Man! it's a
pairfect meeracle to me how she lived through it!' spent many days
stretched on his back, dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as
if at the bottom of an abyss of unrest. He did not care what the
end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference.
The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human
thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men,
the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the
dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing but the disorder of
his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the midst of a
small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck.
But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him
bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the
unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such
sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any
cost. Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about
It.
His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at
an Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was
slow, and he was left behind.
There were only two other patients in the white men's ward: the
purser of a gunboat, who had broken his leg falling down a
hatchway; and a kind of railway contractor from a neighbouring
province, afflicted by some mysterious tropical disease, who held
the doctor for an ass, and indulged in secret debaucheries of
patent medicine which his Tamil servant used to smuggle in with
unwearied devotion. They told each other the story of their lives,
played cards a little, or, yawning and in pyjamas, lounged through
the day in easy-chairs without saying a word. The hospital stood on
a hill, and a gentle breeze entering through the windows, always
flung wide open, brought into the bare room the softness of the
sky, the languor of the earth, the bewitching breath of the Eastern
waters. There were perfumes in it, suggestions of infinite repose,
the gift of endless dreams. Jim looked every day over the thickets
of gardens, beyond the roofs of the town, over the fronds of palms
growing on the shore, at that roadstead which is a thoroughfare to
the East,—at the roadstead dotted by garlanded islets, lighted by
festal sunshine, its ships like toys, its brilliant activity
resembling a holiday pageant, with the eternal serenity of the
Eastern sky overhead and the smiling peace of the Eastern seas
possessing the space as far as the horizon.
Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into the
town to look for some opportunity to get home. Nothing offered just
then, and, while waiting, he associated naturally with the men of
his calling in the port. These were of two kinds. Some, very few
and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an
undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of
dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes,
dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of
the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic
existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of
achievement. The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there
by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships. They
had now a horror of the home service, with its harder conditions,
severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were
attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved
short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the
distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard
work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of
dismissal, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen,
Arabs, half-castes—would have served the devil himself had he made
it easy enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how
So-and-so got charge of a boat on the coast of China—a soft thing;
how this one had an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one
was doing well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said—in their
actions, in their looks, in their persons—could be detected the
soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely
through existence.
To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first
more unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found a
fascination in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing
so well on such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time,
beside the original disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment;
and suddenly, giving up the idea of going home, he took a berth as
chief mate of the Patna.
The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a
greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned
water-tank. She was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and
commanded by a sort of renegade New South Wales German, very
anxious to curse publicly his native country, but who, apparently
on the strength of Bismarck's victorious policy, brutalised all
those he was not afraid of, and wore a 'blood-and-iron' air,'
combined with a purple nose and a red moustache. After she had been
painted outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred pilgrims
(more or less) were driven on board of her as she lay with steam up
alongside a wooden jetty.
They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged
by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a
continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a
murmur, or a look back; and when clear of confining rails spread on
all sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down
the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship—like
water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and
crannies, like water rising silently even with the rim. Eight
hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and
memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and
from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths,
descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows,
crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through
suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld
by one desire. They came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from
populous campongs, from villages by the sea. At the call of an idea
they had left their forests, their clearings, the protection of
their rulers, their prosperity, their poverty, the surroundings of
their youth and the graves of their fathers. They came covered with
dust, with sweat, with grime, with rags—the strong men at the head
of family parties, the lean old men pressing forward without hope
of return; young boys with fearless eyes glancing curiously, shy
little girls with tumbled long hair; the timid women muffled up and
clasping to their breasts, wrapped in loose ends of soiled
head-cloths, their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of an
exacting belief.
'Look at dese cattle,' said the German skipper to his new chief
mate.
An Arab, the leader of that pious voyage, came last. He walked
slowly aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown and large
turban. A string of servants followed, loaded with his luggage; the
Patna cast off and backed away from the wharf.
She was headed between two small islets, crossed obliquely the
anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung through half a circle in
the shadow of a hill, then ranged close to a ledge of foaming
reefs. The Arab, standing up aft, recited aloud the prayer of
travellers by sea. He invoked the favour of the Most High upon that
journey, implored His blessing on men's toil and on the secret
purposes of their hearts; the steamer pounded in the dusk the calm
water of the Strait; and far astern of the pilgrim ship a
screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers on a treacherous
shoal, seemed to wink at her its eye of flame, as if in derision of
her errand of faith.
She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her way
through the 'One-degree' passage. She held on straight for the Red
Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded,
enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought,
oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy.
And under the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and
profound, remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without
a wrinkle—viscous, stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss,
passed over that plain, luminous and smooth, unrolled a black
ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the water a
white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of a
track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.
Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions
with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of
light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up
with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the
pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank
mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the
same distance ahead of her advancing bows. The five whites on board
lived amidships, isolated from the human cargo. The awnings covered
the deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a
low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of
people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days,
still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if
falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and
the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way
black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a
flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.
The nights descended on her like a benediction.